My Family’s Immigration Would Have Been Considered “Illegal” Too

OG History is a Teen Vogue series where we unearth history not told through a white, cisheteropatriarchal lens. Here, Jessica Goudeau — whose ancestors immigrated from the southern U.S. to Texas (then part of Mexico) in the 1820s and 1830s — reflects on her family’s history.

Before I was born, my family crossed the border into Texas illegally. They heard that Texas was a land of opportunity. They knew they weren’t supposed to — it was against the law, after all — but really, what could they do? There were no jobs available near them. The farms were overworked. They needed a place where they could build a good life for their children and grandchildren. Coming to Texas, this expansive state where there is more land than people and where those who work hard can have a chance to get ahead, was the logical choice.

My family members were undocumented immigrants from the United States who settled in Mexican-owned Texas in the 1800s. And when the Mexican government tried to curb Anglo (here meaning non-Latinx white people) immigration to Texas, my ancestors and their neighbors declared war against the Mexican government. Growing up, I never heard the story that way — not in my history classes and not in my family lore. I never questioned the narrative I received: that my Anglo ancestors were on the right side of history.

I still remember how reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera for the first time in college shook my worldview completely. I grew up in San Antonio and my mom’s family lived all throughout South Texas. We lived not far from where Anzaldúa, a poet, feminist theorist, and writer, grew up. Though my family is Anglo and Anzaldúa is Chicana, the terrain she describes in the book is very familiar to me. I wanted to put myself in Anzaldúa’s position — the protagonist forging a new way, the multilingual speaker switching languages without missing a beat, the outsider critiquing an oppressive system. But Anzaldúa’s history lesson at the very beginning of the first chapter made it clear where my family’s place was in our shared history of Texas. That’s exactly her point.

In a few paragraphs, Anzaldúa resituates the events I learned in Texas history class. When she says “Anglos migrated illegally into Texas” in the 1800s, she is describing one of the largest colonization movements in U.S. history. U.S. citizens looking for land where they could settle came to Mexican-owned Texas; some came legally, others did not.

From 1821 to 1836, the Mexican government sold legal contracts to U.S. citizens to resettle in the Mexican state of Texas. The people who bought those contracts promised the government they would be good citizens of Mexico, that they would be Catholic, and that they would not own slaves (promises many of them had no intention of keeping). Many more immigrants from the United States streamed into Texas whether they had one of those legal contracts or not. Several of my ancestors arrived in central Texas around that time as immigrants. Anzaldúa and others make a very clear argument: the people who did not specifically receive one of the legal contracts given by the Mexican government moved to Texas illegally. Several of my Anglo ancestors came here without the proper documents when they settled in Texas — meaning, they broke the law.

The Mexican government tried to curb the immigration of undocumented U.S. citizens through a series of laws. The Anglo colonizers did not respond well; the increased tension led to skirmishes throughout the state, eventually ending with the Battle of the Alamo in 1836. In that battle, the famous adventurer Davy Crockett, who was known for wearing a “coonskin cap,” and 200 other men died in an almost two-week siege. Those men fought for Texas independence but lost a major battle; for a few weeks, it looked like Mexico had succeeded in keeping their territory.

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Growing up in San Antonio, I went on field trips to the Alamo with my class at school and learned about the deaths of those “heroes.” Because of my fond memories of those field trips, I resisted the first time I read Anzaldúa’s statement that the Battle of the Alamo “became, for the whites, the symbol for the cowardly and villainous character of the Mexicans…a symbol that legitimized the white imperialist takeover.” It wasn’t the “white imperialist takeover,” I thought, it was the fight for independence. Texas Independence Day came at the Battle of San Jacinto, just weeks after the Battle of the Alamo — every kid in Texas knows that. It was a short fight and the Anglo immigrants avenged the deaths of Davy Crockett and the “heroes” of the Alamo in defeating Santa Anna…and I realized that Anzaldúa was right.

White Texans — my ancestors — weren’t on the defensive. We were on the offensive, taking the country away from the Mexican government trying to defend their borders. That takeover was completed 10 years later at the end of the U.S.–Mexican War in 1848, when half of Mexico became what we now know as California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas; the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo left thousands of Mexicans stranded in hostile territory.

Anzaldúa juxtaposes two phrases to describe the events of that tumultuous time. One is a quote from a leader in the Texas revolution, William H. Wharton: “The wilderness of Texas has been redeemed by Anglo-American blood and enterprise.” Anzaldúa rewrites that version in her own words: “The Gringo, locked into the fiction of white superiority, seized complete political power, stripping Indians and Mexicans of their land while their feet were still rooted in it.” Wharton and other white male leaders of the Texas Revolution became famous; elementary schools and roads are named after them. The Native Americans and Mexicans who were stripped of their land are largely forgotten, erased from our official history.

I tell my daughters that we are the descendants of the people who took the land from the ancestors of the Chicanitas they play with every day on the playground. In fact, these weren’t just distant relatives. My great-uncle was one of the Texas Rangers, a fact I was proud of growing up, until I read in Borderlands/La Frontera about the Texas Rangers who would “take [Chicanos] into the brush and shoot them.” Anzaldúa is talking about a specific response by Rangers to an October 18, 1915, train robbery in Brownsville, Texas, led by leaders of a liberation movement against the United States. But that one line stuck with me for years. My uncle became a Ranger after the worst period of systemic persecution of Chicano/as, but I honestly don’t know what his views were. In the years when I could have asked my grandmother and other older relatives while they were still alive, I’m not sure I would have questioned their premise that white people who committed acts of violence did it for reasons of justice, that they were “heroes” rather than colonizers.

Anzaldúa’s powerful book and others helped me switch my view and take white people out of the central position in history. As much as I can, I’m committed to raising my own gringitas to ask: Who has the rights to this land? The Native Americans whose ancestors lived here before Anglos began keeping a record of history? The descendants of the Chicanos whose communities along the border were devastated for decades by policies designed to benefit only the white colonizers? The Latinx people who crossed the border as economic migrants in order to find a sustainable life for their families? Or the white people who are living under the unquestioned assumption that we now have a right to defend the land we once stole?

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These questions matter not only when taking the long view of history, but with current events as well — especially considering the Trump administration's rhetoric and actions toward undocumented immigrants.

If we could somehow go back 200 years, or if the U.S.–Mexican War had ended differently, or if any number of things had changed in history, my family members would be the ones who would have to show proof of documentation. But I cannot roll back time. And my white skin means no one will ever stop and interrogate me about whether I have my papers in order like my Latinx friends and neighbors. All I can do is speak out so we never forget — in Texas, Anglos were the original undocumented immigrants.